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Posts Tagged ‘Arts Council’

One of the books on this year’s Guardian First Book Award shortlist is from a brand new not-for-private-profit publisher, And Other Stories, established in 2010 with funding from the Arts Council. Down the Rabbit Hole, by Juan Pablo Villalobos (pictured left), is a darkly comic novel about Latin-American drug-dealers. The other titles vying for the £10,000 prize are Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (Bloomsbury), which was also shortlisted for this year’s Booker; Amy Waldman’s The Submission (William Heinemann), a novel about the tensions arising around the building of a 9/11 memorial; Kashmiri author Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (Viking); and – the only non-fiction book to make the shortlist this year – American cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies (Fourth Estate), a biography of the disease. You can read extracts of all the books with introductions by the authors on the Guardian website.

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Congratulations to Arts Council funded independent publishers Route Online. One of their authors, Michael Nath, has been shortlisted for the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel La Rochelle.  The winner of the prize – chosen by the Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh University, assisted by PhD students – will be announced at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival in August.

Established in 1919, the James Tait Black Prize is Britain’s oldest literary award. Two prizes are awarded each year, one for fiction, one for biography. Previous winners in the novel category include E M Forster, Siegfried Sassoon, Aldous Huxley, D H Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Beryl Bainbridge, Angela Carter, John le Carré and Bruce Chatwin.

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